Ancient Aliens: Evidence of Stephen Hawking’s Claim that “Philosophy is Dead”
Note: This article was cited within the New York Times (July 22, 2018) as an intellectual counter to the emerging religion of “Ancient Aliens.”
The Grand Design (2012), Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow claimed that “philosophy is dead” (p in the book. 5). They wrote: “We exist however for a short time, and in that time explore but a tiny part of the whole universe. But humans are a species that are curious. We wonder, we seek answers. Living in this world that is vast is by turns kind and cruel, and gazing in the immense heavens above, folks have always asked a variety of questions: just how can we comprehend the world by which we find ourselves? So how exactly does the universe behave? What is the nature of reality? Where d > philosophy is dead. Philosophy have not kept up with modern developments in science, particularly physics.” (p. 5).
Needless to say, philosophy continues to be alive in academic journals, Amazon books, and also the philosophy that is shrinking at the Barnes & Noble bookstores. But, as a force in popular culture, contemporary philosophy is basically dead, primarily since it has failed to keep up using the discoveries in contemporary cosmology. When you look at the wake of the stunning achievements of the Apollo program and also the Hubble Space Telescope (just two examples), philosophy has did not generate a well known cosmic narrative that integrates the origins and destinies for the human species to the vast and wondrous cosmos—an expanding universe stretching across 100 billion light years and populated with 2 trillion galaxies and untold numbers of stars, planets, lifeforms, and black holes. This death began aided by the crash of Apollo 8 and Earthrise.
This cosmic and failure that is philosophical ev >2001: a place Odyssey (1968) and Interstellar (2014), Hollywood populates the expanding universe with endless monsters (ex: the Alien series) and apocalyptic warfare (ex: Star Wars), complimented by hardly any awe buy essays online, wonder, and discovery. The Star that is recent Trek are not too distinctive from Star Wars. Here we are fifty years after Apollo and thirty years following the Hubble telescope, therefore the dominant ideologies are still situated in cosmic narcissism and super-specialness—pretending that is human be the center of this universe or under the delusion that a Creator or Ancient Aliens are searching out for us.
The hit television series Ancient Aliens (2010-) has hijacked the cosmic narratives from Apollo and 2001 and claims to explain humanity’s origins and destiny in the universe in the absence of a meaningful space philosophy. In Ancient Aliens, we can see philosophy’s mediated corpse, where an attempted space philosophy and cosmic narrative have crashed and they are still aflame in the us in the History Channel.